“When cancer is not cancer.” By Peggy Orenstein, The California Sunday Magazine.
Peggy Orenstein (The New York Times bestselling author and contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine) writes a short, provocative profile of an influential cancer specialist in San Francisco who has proposed reclassifying nearly a third of breast cancer cases, and is launching a 100,000-patient trial to prove that her approach could reduce over-treatment and, possibly, save lives.
I walk past the unadorned doors at the Carol Franc Buck Breast Care Center at the University of California, San Francisco, along a corridor decorated in shades of mauve so soothing that they barely register as colors. All is generic, aggressively nondescript, until, that is, I reach the office of Laura Esserman, the center’s director. Her entryway is papered over with cartoons that mock right-wing pundits. There are inspirational quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Niccolò Machiavelli, among others, all boiling down to one sentiment: When you challenge people’s deeply held beliefs, well, haters gonna hate. Esserman has helped to catalyze some of the most contentious debates about breast cancer.
Related:
- Carcinoma: What’s in a name? by Gayle Sulik, Psychology Today, Jul. 31, 2013.
- Time to debunk the mammography myth by Gayle Sulik and Bonnie Spanier, CNN, Mar. 18, 2014.
- Canadian National Breast Screening Study by Bonnie Spanier and Gayle Sulik, Breast Cancer Consortium Research Brief.
- Book Review: From Zero to Mastectomy: What I Learned and You Need to Know About Stage 0 Breast Cancer by Bonnie Spanier, Breast Cancer Consortium, Aug. 1, 2013.
- Should we Rename DCIS? by Jackie Fox, author of From Zero to Mastectomy, Breast Cancer Consortium, Aug. 7, 2013.
- What’s In A Name? Cancer – or Indolent Lesions of Epithelial Origin, BCSMCommunity.org, Aug. 5, 2013.
